AML’s SITREP (Situation Report)

What is a SITREP. It’s been almost 4 months since I took on this endeavor moonlighting as a blogger. I must say, it’s quite difficult to keep up with which hat I’m wearing on any given day but I do enjoy writing to all of you. I thought it fitting to provide a progress update of sorts, a situation report or SITREP. I have seen other seasoned bloggers give such posts and it’s only fair I do my own.

As a new blogger, it is useful to visually see the impact of SEO and DM when it works. November 9th was the highest session access but not related to blog posts quite yet. The cause of the spike was interaction with Twitter. I had retweeted three Data Science-related subjects but the one on November 6th was well received for my website. The tweets drove website sessions (the blue line graph) when interested consumers followed the url link on my Twitter Profile. The graphic below displays the impact Twitter can have on my website.

Week 10’s blog post generated the highest numbers of pageviews Automate My Life has seen so far. A whopping 235 pageviews! The pageviews are the result of a mixture of Week 10’s blog post and a recent impact on Twitter. As you can tell from the below graphic, more than half of our users are new visitors. An average session is 2 minutes and 43 seconds on our website. As you can tell from the tail end of the line graph, website traffic has been trending solidly upward since November 12th.

Using Google Analytics

Although there are helpful analytics plugins for WordPress, I found that actually going to the Google Analytics website was the best option. The website allows you to do create market segmentations that are more powerful than a small graph a WordPress dashboard. As you can see from the graphics below, the blogger is able to evaluate the consumers at any given time. We can also see the countries that consumers access content from, where website traffic originates, and how many sessions are currently active. As a data guy, I really do like this kind of stuff.

A real-time data stream will affect your site’s SEO and Digital Marketing strategy each week. One of the more interesting dashboards I found useful in Google Analytics was the “Top Channels” analysis. This dashboard provides insight to your website’s traffic origins and categorizes the traffic into organic search, direct, referral or social. For my website, this was of great value. You can see that of 60% of my website traffic was organic search (originated from a search engine).

SEO and DM is cyclical in nature. With each blog post you generate, you should always test how is was received by your consumers. I wrote a blog post about streaming Spotify from the Python programming language. One key thing I did was use my connected Twitter account to also tweet the post directly from WordPress. Using the @Spotify handle, my website saw a spike in web sessions that day as well. With Google Analytics you can also create custom reports that monitor very detailed information about your website.

What I have Learned So Far

With SEO and DM strategy at the helm of your blog site, you can understand online business and gain the most information possible. Social media can be used as a titan of consumer engagement. The more I engage the more you engage.